Travels in the Scriptorium

An old man sits alone in an empty room. He has no idea how he came to be there, or for how long he will be detained. There are a few bare items of furniture: a bed, a desk, a table lamp, each labelled as if to aid the rehabilitation of a recovering amnesiac. Is it a hospital ward? A prison? One of those suspiciously cheap French cubicle-hotels staffed entirely by machines?

No - it's an old Paul Auster alienation trope: and the reason we know this is because there's a manuscript on the desk which the old man, identified only as Mr Blank, feels compelled to read. It begins with the image of an old man sitting alone in an empty room, with no idea how he came to be there, or for how long he will be detained.

We have been here, or somewhere very much like it, before. In fact, you could make a case that Auster's entire oeuvre revolves around an obsessive return to this image of an empty room. His debut, The New York Trilogy, featured a character known only as Blue, whose life "has been reduced to no life at all ... He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life". And in the final part of the trilogy - entitled, significantly, The Locked Room - the unidentified narrator writes: "At best, there was one impoverished image: the door of a locked room. This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull."

Travels in the Scriptorium is an extremely skimpy book - it's less than 150 pages long - yet its purpose seems to be to prove that the inside of Auster's skull can become extremely crowded at times. The manuscript on the desk (which we're encouraged to believe is the book we're currently reading) is supposedly written by NR Fanshawe. Auster-spotters will recognise this as the enigmatic author from The New York Trilogy who is trailed by a private detective named Quinn, who has in turn been mistaken for a novelist called Paul Auster. Mr Blank, feeling understandably persecuted, demands to see his lawyer. "Don't you recognise me?" says the attorney when he finally arrives. "I was your first operative. I'm Quinn."

This strange talk of "operatives" perhaps holds the key to the book which, we are advised on the first page, is not a narrative but a "report". This explains the anodyne sentence structure and impassive surveillance vocabulary employed throughout, though the coldly subjective account is randomly enlivened by the odd imaginative flourish. Sometimes we're given routine descriptions of the old man's performance on the toilet; at others we're let in on the perception that he is "lost in a fogland of ghost-like beings and broken memories as he searches for an answer to the question that haunts him".

The question that begins to haunt the reader is: when is this ever likely to end? Wherever and whatever this room represents, it's clearly visiting hour for the entire panoply of Auster's dramatis personae. Anna Blume, chief protagonist of In the Country of Last Things (previously married to David Zimmer, chief protagonist of The Book of Illusions) drops by in the guise of a nurse. Sophie, Fanshawe's widow, shows up with a meal trolley. Most obscurely of all, James P Flood, a former policeman who appeared only as a marginal reference to a dream in a novel by Fanshawe, arrives demanding that someone explain to him what it all means: "without that dream I'm nothing, literally nothing".

Are we therefore to take it that Mr Blank is actually the elusive Fanshawe following an inexplicable loss of memory? Does it imply that Fanshawe is ultimately responsible for the works of Paul Auster? Or is it the other way around? More importantly, hasn't this existential parlour game been going on so long that most people have long since ceased to care?

The most dispiriting aspect of this retreat to an unidentified room is that it feels like a backward step from Auster's last novel, The Brooklyn Follies, which signalled a welcome intent to get out more. In that book Auster exercised his considerable prowess as a conventional storyteller, spinning an amiably rambling saga about a suburban odd couple and their offbeat artistic and bookselling circuit. It carried one or two obligatory nods towards Kafka, but otherwise seemed evidence of a warm heart beating beneath the stern, postmodern carapace.

Yet where The Brooklyn Follies was fat and generous, Travels in the Scriptorium feels lean and almost deliberately flavourless. One thinks of the hapless Blue stuck with the same conundrum Mr Blank is still struggling with more than 20 years later: "how to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?" Travels in the Scriptorium offers no clues as to a way out, yet The Brooklyn Follies suggested a fairly simple strategy: why not try the door?